Because it's a certain person's
birthday today, the 554th
Soundtrack of the Week is
the score for Tarkovsky's Solaris,
composed by Eduard Artemiev.

There are seventeen cues, each titled "Part I", "Part II"
and so on.

"Part I" is actually Bach's Choral Prelude in F Minor
played on some kind of organ.

"Part II" is a brilliantly minimalist and textural
electronic piece, a powerful yet restrained soundscape of
various colors and feels. Apprently Artemiev used
some kind of crazy Soviet synthesizer that
interpreted glass plates with sine waves on them
that Artemiev created. This is without a doubt one of the
best ways to make music.

This aptly describes "Part III" as well, though
there are the additions of some percussive elements
and more extreme quiets.

The fourth part suggests wind, both the sounds of wind
itself and also of wind chimes. It's exquisitely
subtle and precise. The fifth cue offers a
variation on this, or perhaps better described
as the same music at a slightly higher temperature.

"Part VI" is the longest cue on the record, a little
over seven minutes. It's hard to say much about it other
than that it's another quiet, textural electronic piece
that reminds me of the sounds of wind. "Part VII" is
much the same.

After a brief electronic intro, "Part VIII" reprises
the Bach piece.

"Part IX" brings in what sounds like a woman's voice
singing smooth, wordless vocals with some gentle
support from a flute. Delicate
electronic sounds conclude the piece.

The sound of a man singing actual words in a shanty-like
style is the startling opening to the tenth part of
the score. Again, he is replaced by delicate electronic sounds.

"Part XI" combines recordings of sounds of water as well
as human voices and chirping birds with the electronic
identity of the score that's been well established.
This is a spacious and multi-dimensional cue,
quite effective on its own as sonic art.

After this comes another reprise of the Bach prelude.

The thirteenth cue is more delicate, crystalline
electric noises, like a small fire made of glass.

"Part XIV" is a short cue, another quiet electronic statement
but with slightly more weight than the previous ones.

After this comes a sonic atmosphere that's thicker
and has more gravity, as if all those delicate, wispy
cues had massed together.

The next cue reprises the Bach prelude again but this time
with more instruments, making it sound more significant.
About halfway through, you hear a man breathing heavily
and the music is replaced by a very different kind of
piece, less electronic and more solid, earthier than it is airy.
It crescendoes to what's probably the highest volume level on
the record.

The final cue sounds like a variation on the "Part I"
piece, a plaintive melody played on a church organ.

It makes me curious to see the movie again, but
I'm saving it for a package experience of reading the book,
re-watching the made for Soviet TV adaptaion that
preceded Tarkovsky's film, then the Tarkovsky film
and then the Steven Soderberg re-make, which I don't
expect to enjoy. At which point I should be all
Solarised out.

Search on google for "Eastside beer" and you'll
find that there was a brewery of that name from
1907 to maybe as late as 1979.

According to
Los Angeles magazine, George Zobelein
bought the Los Angeles Brewing Company in 1907
and started his own brewery, Eastside, which
was itself bought by Pabst in 1948 and then
discarded by 1979.

But why would you google Eastside beer in the first place?
Maybe because you just watched a movie from 1954 called
Highway Dragnet.

There's an amusing scene in a roadside dinner and they
have an Eastside beer sign in the window.

A little later on there's an Arden Ice Cream truck.
It seems there were Arden dairy farms in California and New York
and maybe Arizona, too.

They seem to be proud of their Butterscotch Filbert, which
is how I learned that filbert is apparently another name for
hazelnut.

It's a decent movie, certainly worth watching
for the location photography at least.

Joan Samson's The Auctioneer is a masterpiece of
deft, economical writing.

It's about a tiny rural farming town in New Hampshire and
how it's insidiously changed by the arrival of the title character,
Perly Dunsmore, part demon, part salesman, all American (much
in the same way the devil firmly asserts his American-ness
in The Devil and Daniel Webster a.k.a. All That
Money Can Buy).

The Auctioneer is often compared favorably and aptly, it
turns out,
to Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery". Jackson's short story "The
Summer People" might be a distant relative as well.

Like Jackson, Samson writes precisely and confidently, every
page containing a perfect word, phrase or sentence to admire.
The pacing is almost impeccable as well. Rarely are screws turned so well.

While considered a horror novel, it's horror in the vein of
"The Lottery". Nothing supernatural, nothing more evil than
people themselves and their ability to exploit and be exploited,
their capacities for greed and cruelty.

The story centers on a small family who live on a farm
and represent three generations, the past, present and potential
future of the family, the land and the community.

When asked to donate something to an auction to raise money
hire deputies for the police force, they're skeptical that this
cause is a necessary one, but they don't mind getting
rid of some clutter. They even get a small amount paid back
to them after the auction.

These requests for donations become a weekly ritual and
it becomes clear that they're no longer requests and never were.
People who refuse to donate invariably have some very serious accidents.
The police force keeps growing and the new deputies are generally
the most thuggish and dangerous men in town.

And so we observe our frogs in the pot of water being
slowly brought to boil, not to mention the creep of
some kind of totalitarianism, but an almost completely
implicit one. No demands or threats are made overtly. But
people know.

The story's political dimension extends to current events, referencing
the Vietnam War and anticipating the emotion and rhetoric that
would come to fuel the Reagan Revolution, as well as
blatant and direct appeals to notions of white supremacy.

Nothing is overdone and numerous subtle touches are woven
through the book. This is a Yankee town and Dunsmore has
a dog named Dixie, for instance. Dixie like every other
person or dog in this book, is a distinct character,
well drawn and real.

(Though the main characters have a dog
that just sort of disappears near the end of the book. This
seems like a rare oversight.)

The color of red is used to indicate the danger of the
auctioneer, who first appears wearing a red plaid shirt, and there
is a motif of fire, an obvious signifier
of hell, that both begins and ends the book. Fire's nature
as an element of damnation or purification comes into play.

Dunsmore is also described as having skin so burned that it's as
brown as his hair, another telling detail. This is as close
as we come to hearing that the auctioneer is literally infernal.

The first line is "The fire rose in a perfect cone as if suspended
by the wisp of smoke that ascended in a straight line to the high
spring sky". The second line is worth including also, for its
intimations of destruction and danger and pain: "Mim and John
dragged whole dry saplings from the brush pile by the stone wall
and heaved them into the flames, stepping back quickly as the
dead leaves caught with a hiss".

For the 553rd
Soundtrack of the Week we're listening
to Paul Piot & Michel Roy's music for
the 1985 French horror movie Devil Story.

Never heard of this movie or these composers,
but mid-'80s horror suggested synth score and I was right.

It's not the usual, though. Almost the first half
of the eight-minute main theme is a synth and violin
duo, with ominous electronic low tones combining
effectively with the higher and different textured
sound of the violin.

Then at the halfway point the
violin is replaced by another synth voice, perhaps
some kind of horn setting, with a few other lines
thrown in, some percussive, others atmospheric.
When the violin returns, it blends with this thicker
sound even more successfully, seeming to take
on some of the electric character of the synthesizers.

A pounding synth starts out "Normandy Land", which
sounds like it might have been influenced by Jan Hammer's
music for Miami Vice. It has as simple but
haunting melody and the whole thing is very minor key
and dreamy.

"The Boat Legend" sounds like it could have
come from another movie entirely. Despite the heavy
reliance on synth, it's an orchestral cue and a heroic,
sweeping one at that. It sounds like another mixture
of acoustic violin and electronic keyboard, possibly
only the two instruments creating the effect of a much
larger ensemble.

"Castle Theme" is that famous Bach organ
piece that's been used way too many times to indicate
a haunted mansion or some such thing. You've heard it and
you know it. This sounds like it was played on a real
church organ.

This is followed by "The Chase" which sets up a
great electro-groove and takes its time to
develop. First menacing low tones come in like mist.
Then some synth lines start pulsating over it,
setting up polyrhythms or a polyrhythm effect.
I was hoping for something more melodic after the introduction,
but this is a cool and unusual piece.

Then there are reprises of both the main theme and
"Normandy Land", not especially different in any way I noticed.

The rest of the album is a suite of unreleased tracks,
called simply "Unreleased Track #1", "Unreleased
Track #2" and so on.

The first one is an eerie and stabbing synth feature,
effectively creepy and horrific.

The second is a half-minute drone slab of menace,
while the third uses the church organ again to
pile on layers of thick notes through which the ear
can discern shapes of melodic lines.

The fourth one has a musical staircase shape,
with notes walking up and down and stomping their
metaphorical feet.

"Unreleased Track #5" is another very short one,
about half a minute, but is strangely pretty,
occupying the high register instead of the lower
one, and mysteriously lyrical.

The sixth cue also stays in the high register
but brings in what sounds like a "voice" setting
on the synthesizer. It's effectively unnerving and
atmospheric as well as having a nice melodic shape.

That idea is continued in the seventh and final
unreleased cue, synth voices flirting with church
music but in an infernal sort of way.

In That Darn Cat! Hayley Mills's character
is dating a surfer named Canoe.

He drives
a woodie with his board in the back and all he cares
about is surfing and eating—and going to see surf movies at the
drive-in.

They have an amusing conversation about the rut they're in.

The Hayley Mills character then expresses a desire to see
a different kind of movie with more of a romance-centered plot
and in a mildly meta sort of way she describes the movie they
happen to be starring in.

Later on they actually go to the drive-in
and we're treated to a Night of the Surfer
movie poster and some scenes with the movie itself in the
background.

The 552nd
Soundtrack of the Week is the score
for a movie that I always wanted to see when I was a kid
but probably never did: That Darn Cat!, music by
Bob Brunner.

Differences between the original soundtrack recording
and the album version appear immediately with the title song.
Rendered by Bobby Darin in the movie, here you have a version
sung by Louis Prima and it has a totally different feel. Still a great
song, though. "While the city sleeps / Every night he creeps /
Just surveyin' his domain / He roams around / Like he owns the
town / He's the kind / He makes that plain / He knows
every trick / Doesn't miss a lick / When it comes to keepin'
fat / Some city slicker / No one is quicker / Than that darn cat!"

"Hoodlum's Hideout" immediately alerts listeners
to something else going on with this music. The spirit
of Henry Mancini haunts every cue. The famous "Pink Panther"
theme is frequently recalled and this cue, with its jazzy
walking bass should help you remember Peter Gunn.

Strings create the ambience of "Patti" and you'd
be forgiven for thinking this is Mancini in a blindfold
test. The harmonic structure might also make you think
of several jazz standards such as "Angel Eyes" or "I Thought
About You".

Menace and tension are the moods prevalent in
"Mom's in Distress". Walking bass and some sinuous
horn lines are again out of the Mancini playbook.

"Snoopy's Theme" is for Elsa Lanchester's
character, I think, who appears to be there
for comic relief. It's an odd choice since the movie's
a comedy already and every single person in it is providing
some kind of comic business. It ends in slapstick, as
evidenced by the inclusion of the accompanying sound effect
at the end of the track. As nice it is as to see
Elsa Lanchester and William Demarest, their entire
parts could have been cut out of the movie, which
is a little long at just a few minutes under two hours.

Then comes "Kitchens To Burn", an effectively
dramatic piece of scoring for one of the only
really serious moments in the movie, concerning the only
really serious part of the plot, the bank robbers' kidnap
victim, whom they intend to kill. In this scene she hopes
to escape by setting the kitchen on fire. It's not clear why she does
this instead of walking out the kitchen door, but that's show
biz for you This scene occurs very near the end of the movie,
so the record doesn't have the cues in chronological order.

The "Surf-In" cue is frankly awesome,
leaving Mancini territory for a hard-nosed, turbo-charged
surf rock tune with fuzzed out guitar that sounds as if it could
be played by Jerry Cole. It's certainly in his style. Okay, I guess
the horn parts still sound like they could be Mancini.

The record's second side continues in the surf vein with"Ten Foot
Surf", which accompanies one of the surf movies playing
at the local drive-in.
This is a cool piece, less surfy than "Surf-In", and more
of an instrumental mutation of the title track, with the "That Darn
Cat" part clearly expressed on various instruments. Pretty impressive
guitar sound, bright and reverby and strong.

Then there's "Four Footed Informant", as the F.B.I.
refers to D.C., the title creature, whose initials stand for
Darn Cat. It's the most Pink Panthery cue on the
record and the similarity is strong enough that I wonder
what Mr. Mancini thought of it, if he happened to hear it.
It's a longish cue and near the end might remind you of
another Mancini score, namely the music for Mr. Lucky.

The first half of "Still Nine Lives To Go" is a gentle and romantic
piece, with just a bit of comedic and suspenseful color
thrown in. Then the bass comes walking in again and we're back
in the jazz land of swinging high-hats and stinging horns.

"ABC's of the F.B.I." is a surprisingly dramatic
and driving piece that effectively picks up the pace
and increases the emotional stakes of the movie. It's
a fine line to walk, since it's a comedy and a kids'
movie but still has the threat of murder at its center.
Having the music add intensity while keeping the
visual action on the light side is a good way to maintain
balance.

"Cat Scat" starts off with the usual walking bass line
but then explodes in a flourish of frantic bongo pounding
and fast jazz saxophone soloing.

After which you're told to "Take This and This and This".
I can't remember what that refers to and I just watched
this movie last night. But it starts in the usual way before
being interrupted by the sound of D.C. meowing—I think this
is when the F.B.I. guy accidentally steps on D.C.—and then
we're in action/danger mode for what must be the climax of the
film or possibly the scene earlier on where D.C. manipulates
the F.B.I. agents into attacking themselves. What a cat!

The record concludes with Bobby Troup & Trio's version
of the title song, closer to the Bobby Darin version heard in
the film, and similar to Nat King Cole's famous trio.
It's a really cool, light, jazz-pop tune, quite pleasant
and catchy. "Now our cat's been paid / Every accolade /
And he's earned all his acclaim / In a blaze of glory /
He ends our story / In the feline Hall of Fame / But
the way life goes / In a year who knows / From the
family he begat / You may made up with one of /
Maybe the son of/ That darn cat!"

The most recent "graphic novel" we've read around here
is Jarrett J. Krosoczka's Hey, Kiddo, an autobiographical
account of the author/artist's childhood and adolescence.

He grew up in Worcester, not far from where I myself grew up.
He never knew his father, though, and was raised by his mother's
parents as his own mother was struggling with drug addiction
and its concomitant dangers and disadvantages.

It's a moving book, as inspiring as it can be
depressing, noteworthy for how effectively it conveys
how important a handful of allies can be, particularly
family members but also friends and teachers. The slightest
encouragement can be powerful fuel for the human engine. And,
of course, a casually discouraging word from an important
person can be almost equally damaging.

Book of this sort aren't worth reading, in my opinion,
if the artwork isn't special, but Krosoczka delivers on this
too. He has his own style, fluid and open and consistent,
that makes the world of his story real and invitingly open to visitors.

There seems to be a consensus that the human brain
isn't fully developed until the age of 25 or so.

This probably explains why for me, Mystery Science
Theater 3000 is first and foremost a Joel Hodgson show.

Mike Nelson did a great job when he took over, however,
and I've been enjoying Jonah Ray's turn even more.
He brought back some of the amiable sleepiness that
was part of Joel's persona.

So MST3K has been having a really good run,
on and off for thirty years now, and has sucessfully
navigated numerous changes in casting and even a few in
format. They've been on a few different channels
and have also lived on videotape, laserdisc, DVD, Blu-ray
and now streaming on Netflix and YouTube and who the hell knows
where else (torrent sites, obviously).

But could a Mystery Science
Theater 3000 comic book be good?

The somewhat surprising answer is yes!

What was best about MST3K wasn't just that they
were making fun of movies because the movies were bad and poorly
made. This was occasionally the case but they did demonstrate
that they could give any movie the same treatment with
similar results because their primary strength was to re-write
the movie on screen to make it funny to us, the audience.

So for the comic book version, they've taken some old
comic books and inserted themselves into them as well
as adding and rewriting text and dialogue, doing what
they've always done, just in a different medium.

You can distinguish from what was originally written
from what was added or altered by looking for the tiny bubble
that marks balloons and captions.

The 551st
Soundtrack of the Week, our first in 2019,
is the groovy music by pop band The Cyrkle for the
X-rated feature The Minx.

It's on groovy pink vinyl!

First up is a song called "Squeeze Play" which is catchy
and toe-tapping and has nice vocal harmonies. This is sort
of in the Buffalo Springfield or Byrds zone, I guess,
though there's an interesting quality to some of the vocal
blends, something about the sonority that's unusual.

Bossa nova influences and wordless vocals define the title
track, which is very much easy listening pop jazz of a sort
that I often can't stand but is actually okay here.

"Murray the Why" is mostly a Beach Boys pastiche
and a good song. Is Murray supposed to be Murray Wilson?
That seems unlikely but it's an interesting coincidence if not.

"The Rigging" is an instrumental structurally like
"Wipe Out" but with a few weird flourishes from
either a mysterious instrument or a sped-up recording
of a not so weird instrument".

Guitar-driven instrumental surf music is the foundation
for "The Party", which is in 6/8 and will sound like a lot
of tunes you've heard before, particularly songs
like "Surfer Girl". There's a smooth wordless vocal
chorus crooning gently behind the instruments.

After this comes "Nicole" and some sitar and
more psychedelic rock touches in the guitar and vocals.
It's droney and trippy and the panning of the drums
gives it a stereo spaciousness that's cool to experience.
At the end it builds in speed and intensity.

"Something Special", the first of a few bonus
cuts on this particular LP, is a piano-driven and buoyant pop instrumental
with jangly electric and a few unexpected tempo and rhythm
alterations with horn parts along the lines of the horns
in "All You Need Is Love".

This side of the record closes with the
second bonus cut, "Terry's Theme", another
bonus cut and a bossa nova
tune, fairly generic but well done and enjoyable
to listen to.

The second side opens with the love song "It's a
Lovely Game, Louise", which
is a nice but fairly standard lounge ballad.

This is followed by a peppy instrumental
version of the title song with the melody played
on a horn that has an irritatingly bright and showy
tone.

Then there's a version of "Something
Special" with lyrics, and it's an improvement
over the instrumental. It's a nice song and works
better has a straight rock/pop number with vocals
and a story to tell.

"On the Road" is a really great instrumental
piece in 5/4 with the electric guitar having
a sitar-like tone.

After this comes "Walter's Riff", an instrumental
in the style of Duane Eddy, with some deep tremolo
on the guitar and a shuffle feel from the rhythm section
and even the occasional cowboy whoop and holler.

Snare drum and timpani open "The Chase" and while
you might be expecting a military march, piano and
hand percussion come in and steer the cue into a groovier
direction. The snare and timpani stick around but an organ
comes in also, then distorted electric guitar. It's an
agreeably crazy mixture!

The last two cuts are also bonus tracks. "Baxter's Dangerous
Game" starts with just bongos. After a surprisingly long time,
the rest of the band comes in, guitar, bass, organ, other percussion.
What they play ranges from almost prog-like lines to
almost "classical" dramatic underscore.

And then finally there's "Kites", with some lovely
acoustic guitar and flute playing and a feel that recalls
both Spanish and Japanese music. About halfway through
it switches gears to a more psychedelic
rock thing and then almost immediately switches
again to a lyrical and melancholy musical atmosphere.
It switches back and forth like that a few times, really
cool piece.

Like clockwork, every time 2019 comes around again I find myself
thinking about 1922.

And so my hand fell upon an issue of a magazine called Judge
from September 9th of that year.

What was this? A humor magazine, apparently, and combined
with something called Leslie's Weekly, which I do not have.

In September of 1922 the United States was just a few months
away from the third anniversary of Prohibition. As our current
prohibition on soft drugs such as marijuana has been eroding
recently, it's worth noting that the arguments in favor of
legalizing marijuana were being made almost a hundred years
ago in response to the war on alcohol.

So true! And so obvious! And yet they would have to wait
until 1933…

Later in the same issue they publish this amusing
cartoon on the subject of prohibition:

One of the highlights of this issue of Judge
is the column by theatre critic, George Jean Nathan, who would be
amazing at CinemaSins.
I guess he was doing TheatreSins.

In his review of the first of three shows he notes
a groaner of an oversight which artifically stretches out
the story and, more importantly, prevents bringing down
"the eleven o'clock curtain an hour ahead of schedule".

The play is called The Woman Who Laughed
and the male lead, who Nathan asserts "gives a creditable
performance", is future movie star William Powell, who
had his first role in a film that same year of 1922.

Mr. Nathan has also attended various kinds of multimedia
experiment, it seems. Every generation thinks it's the
first to try this kind of thing. "For the last six or seven
years they have been trying to devise some means of combining the
motion pictures and popular dramatic entertainment—as if
the latter, generally speaking, weren't bad enough already."

That says it all, generally speaking.

In 1922 an automobile was perhaps the contemporary
equivalent of a killer app. People were buying them. They
were a "must have". And if you had a house and a car you
also needed a house for your car. We call these garages.
At the time, almost a hundred years ago, this seemed fairly
silly and extravagant, particularly as garages were decked
out with any number of amenities and tools to create
a more suitable environment for caring for your car.

As garages became more and more like houses, somebody
at Judge decided to cut out the middle man,
so to speak, and just store the car in the actual house.
With a few modifications, it's quite sensible.

But perhaps the most humorous thing is this bit from
the advertisement on the back cover, for a book of etiquette.
I don't think this is meant to be funny but this drawing
of the fellow in evening dress with an olive on his fork
might keep me smiling for the rest of my life.

The first book review of the new year will be one of the best
books I read last year, one of the most satisfying, well conceived
and executed, solidly, assuredly well written, the very
definition of great genre fiction, the kind that makes you
stop caring about the whole idea of genre and of any kind of fiction's
need to do anything but be great on whatever terms are its own.

The book in question, which I would probably recommend to
anybody I know personally, is Ken Grimwood's Replay.

The premise isn't too startling, a combination of Peggy Sue
Got Married and Groundhog Day. Jeff Winston,
at 43 years of age, unfulfilled personally and professionally,
dies of a heart attack at his desk at work. And the next thing
he knows he's eighteen again, in his college dorm room in 1963,
25 years in the past.

As the title of the book indicates, he then replays his life,
but with all memories of the life already lived. As you might imagine,
it's easy for him to make a lot of money very quickly, easy
for him to do a lot of things.

But what he can't do is stop himself from dying again,
in 1988, and returning again to the age of 18, this time
with the memories of two adult lives behind him.

This is one of those stories that's almost as much fun
to talk about as it is to read, but on the off chance that you
might someday read it yourself, I won't spoil it any further.

Suffice it to say that you are in excellent hands with Grimwood
here, as he steers this narrative on an impeccably
shaped path of twists and turns. I was enjoying it so much
by the halfway point that I started to get concerned about the
ending. Would he blow it? Would it fly off the rails or off
a cliff? It does not. The reader will be brought safely into harbor
and disembark regretting only that the journey is over.

The first line is "Jeff Winston was on the phone with his
wife when he died".